28 January, 2014

As India stepped into its 65th year as a sovereign, democratic
republic on Sunday, with the traditional display of military hardware,
some relics of the colonial era were still haunting it. Among them is a
notorious law which shields men in uniform guilty of atrocities against
civilians.

The law was introduced by the British during World War
II to crush the Quit India movement of 1942, the last major campaign of
the freedom struggle. It permitted security personnel to conduct raids
and make arrests without warrant and granted them immunity from
prosecution for acts committed in the course of operations.

Free
India’s government re-enacted the law as the Armed Forces Special
Powers Act (AFSPA) in 1948 to protect security personnel dealing with
post-partition riots, and extended it annually till 1957.

A year
later the law was revived to deal with tribal insurgency in Assam and
Manipur. It is applicable only in an area declared as “disturbed”.
Initially the power to declare an area as “disturbed” vested in the
state government but later the central government was also empowered to
do so.

AFSPA has now been in force in the northeastern states
continuously for more than a half-century and in Jammu and Kashmir for
close to a quarter-century. Punjab, where it was introduced in 1983 in
the wake of the Khalistan movement, was freed from its grip in 1997.

The
people of Manipur demanded withdrawal of AFSPA in 2000 after personnel
of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary force which traces its origin to
1835, fired on an unarmed crowd at Malom, near Imphal, killing 10
persons, including a 62-year-old woman and an 18-year-old National
Bravery Award winner.

The Centre’s tough stance forced the state
government to abandon its plan to withdraw AFSPA. Irom Sharmila, a
young poet, began an indefinite fast demanding its withdrawal. More than
13 years later, the fast is still on. She is kept alive through forced
nasal feeding in custody.

After five young men were killed in an
alleged encounter at Pathribal, near Anantag, in 2000 the Jammu and
Kashmir government asked the Centre to withdraw AFSPA or at least
curtail its operation.

The Army claimed those killed were
mercenaries responsible for a massacre. However, the Central Bureau of
Investigation, which probed the incident, concluded it was a case of
cold-blooded murder. It charge-sheeted five officers, including a
brigadier, a lieutenant colonel and two majors, in a criminal court.

In
2004, the Centre, taking note of the Manipur agitation, appointed a
five-member commission, headed by former Supreme Court judge BP Jeevan
Reddy, to review the working of AFSPA. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
said later the law would be amended to make it “humane” in keeping with
the commission’s recommendations. However, there was no action.

The
Executive’s helplessness in the face of the Army’s obdurate stand was
revealed when Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who was earlier in charge
of the Home Ministry, said, “If the Army takes a very strong stand
against any dilution or any amendment to AFSPA, it is difficult for a
civil government to move forward.”

The Judiciary stepped aside
when the Pathribal encounter issue was raised before it. The Supreme
Court asked the Army to decide whether the indicted officers should be
tried by an army court or the regular criminal court. The Army, which
opted for the court martial route, closed the case last week saying the
recorded evidence did not establish any case against the officers.

The
Army’s self-serving finding, arrived at in closed-door proceedings, has
raised doubts about the ability of the system to deal with offenders in
uniform.

Chief of Army Staff Gen Bikram Singh recently
acknowledged that terrorist infiltration into Kashmir dropped from 1,852
in 2001 to 90 in 2013. However, he said, AFSPA cannot be withdrawn as
it is a strategic imperative.

The AFSPA issue is not one of
national security alone. It also has a bearing on rule of law. Both in
Kashmir and in the Northeast, security personnel have attracted charges
of rape. The Justice JS Verma Commission, which looked into the issue of
women’s safety a year ago, suggested that armed forces personnel
accused of sexual offences should not be given AFSPA protection. The
Centre ignored the suggestion.

The National Human Rights
Commission and the Supreme Court appointed Justice Santosh Hegde
commission, which separately studied many alleged encounter deaths in
Manipur, reported that all the cases they examined were fake encounters.
Such widespread abuse of power will only make resolution of political
problems difficult. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 28, 2014.

21 January, 2014

An Indian fairy tale, which was playing out on Twitter, ended abruptly
last week on a tragic note. The chief protagonists were Shashi Tharoor,
India’s dashing minister of state for human resources, who had been
United Nations Under Secretary General and is a successful writer, and
his vivacious Kashmiri wife, Sunanda Pushkar, who had been a business
woman in Dubai.

When Tharoor made a bid for the post of UN
Secretary General in 2007 the Indian government backed him, even though
there was little chance of the Big Five agreeing on one of its
nationals. After losing to Ban Ki-moon, he quit the UN and returned to
India, which he had left as a student. The Congress party welcomed him.
He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kerala, his parents’ home state,
and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed him junior minister in the
External Affairs Ministry.

An active Twitter user, Shashi Tharoor
attracted a large following of more than two million although he
himself followed fewer than 450 persons.

Tharoor ran into trouble
in 2009 when he tweeted he would use “cattle class” in aircraft in
solidarity with “all our holy cows”. Technology-illiterate Congressmen
raised a hue and cry and a party spokesperson said, being new to
politics, he was perhaps not conscious of the sensitivities of people.

The
following year it came to light that a Kerala company bidding for a
place in the Indian Premier League cricket, with Tharoor’s support, had
given sweat equity of Rs700 million to Sunanda Pushkar, whom he was
courting. Two senior ministers who looked into the allegation that she
was a proxy for Tharoor concluded that his explanation was not
satisfactory. He was asked to resign.

Shortly afterwards he
married Sunanda Pushkar. It was the third marriage for both of them. The
couple thereafter divided their time between New Delhi and
Thiruvananthapuram.

When Manmohan Singh reconstituted the Cabinet
in 2012 Tharoor was brought back as minister of state for Human
Resources Development.

Everything appeared to be going well and
he was preparing to seek re-election in the parliamentary elections due
in May when all of a sudden things started falling apart.

Last
Wednesday Tharoor’s followers were bombarded by a barrage of tweets
purportedly sent by him to Mehr Tarar, who describes herself in her
Twitter profile as a mom, former Op-Editor of the Daily Times, Pakistan,
and a columnist. While they were trying to make sense out of them,
Tharoor informed his account had been hacked.

Sunanda Pushkar
announced that she was the one who had sent out tweets from his account.
She told media persons who contacted her that the Lahore-based Mehr
Tarar had been stalking her husband. Responding to a tweet from a
friend, she wrote an incoherent, unpunctuated line: An Indian womans
place apparently SHE is a nobody as someone said “a politician should
not be married.”

Apparently she posted the tweets from
Thiruvananthapuram. The next day she flew to Delhi with Tharoor. From
the airport, he went home and she checked into a luxury hotel. The next
evening she was found dead in her hotel bed.

“Murder by Twitter,”
cried shocked users of the site. Television channels, celebrating the
news, kept up a continuous flow of information, verified and unverified,
throughout the weekend as the family cremated the body and the official
machinery began grappling with medico-legal angles. Politicians
belonging to rival formations, barring stray exceptions, began moves to
cash in on the tragedy.

Under Indian law, a magisterial inquiry
into the death is mandatory since the couple had been married for less
than seven years. A preliminary post mortem report said death was sudden
and unnatural and the body bore injury marks. The police is waiting for
the final report of the surgeons and the magistrate to decide whether
or not to register a case and on what charges and against whom. In a
case of suicide by a married woman, the husband can attract the charge
of abetment.

Twitterati can probably draw a moral from the tragedy: pouring out one’s woes in social networks does not necessarily help. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 21, 2014.

14 January, 2014

For 12 years the Indian government has been trying to strengthen
bonds with the Diaspora. However, its engagement with overseas Indians
remains skewed on social and economic lines.

Since 2003 the
Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs has been celebrating Pravasi
Bharatiya Divas (Overseas Indians Day) on January 9 each year. It was on
that day in 1915 that Mahatma Gandhi returned to India ending life as
an expatriate in South Africa.

This year’s celebrations, spread
over three days, were held last week. The theme, “Engaging Diaspora:
Connecting across Generations”, reflected the government’s desire to
attract young people of Indian origin in other lands.

Overseas
Indian Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi said partnerships between young
Indians at home and those residing in other lands in the industrial and
social sectors would lead to job creation and prosperity.

About
22 million Indians, living in 205 countries, constitute the second
largest Diaspora after the Chinese community of about 50 million. In
1978, the year in which Deng Xiaoping launched market reforms, Beijing
set up the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office to engage with overseas
Chinese who are important players in the economic life of many
countries. Specific areas along the mainland’s long coast were allotted
to Chinese communities in different countries to make investments.

Bharatiya
Pravasi Divas celebrations were initiated by the Bharatiya Janata
Party-led National Democratic Alliance government in 2003 at the
instance of Hindutva elements in the US. The Congress-led United
Progressive Alliance, which came to power after the 2004 elections, set
up the Overseas Indian Affairs Ministry. It also instituted a scheme of
honouring distinguished overseas Indians.

Overseas Indians fall
in two categories: Non-Resident Indians, numbering more than 10 million,
who are citizens of India living abroad for work, education or other
purposes; and Persons of Indian Origin, numbering about 12 million, who,
by definition, are foreign citizens of Indian origin or ancestry.

The
latter category is a mixed lot which includes recent migrants in search
of a better life who have taken up foreign citizenship as well as
descendants of people who were shipped abroad by the British colonial
regime as convicts sentenced to transportation for participation in
revolts or as indentured labourers.

The Gulf States have the
largest Indian community of more than 5.69 million, of whom about 1.79
million are in Saudi Arabia and 1.75 million in the UAE. All but a small
number of them are NRIs who have to return home when their job visas
expire. Beneficiaries of the economic boom triggered by oil price rise,
most of them make modest earnings. However, among them there are also a
few successful businessmen who figure in the Forbes list of the rich.

The
USA accounts for 2.25 million Indians, a fair proportion of them
professionals who have climbed high in corporate ladders. The UK follows
with 1.5 million. Other countries with significant Indian presence
include South Africa (1.22m), Mauritius (0.88m), Trinidad and Tobago
(0.55m), Australia (0.45m), Guyana (0.32m) and Fiji (0.31m).

While
recent migrants have carried with them regional and religious and caste
prejudices from the homeland, in places like the West Indies and Fiji
the Indian communities have largely overcome them through inter-marriage
over a period of more than a century.

The government has failed
to take note of the differing character of overseas Indian communities
and devise suitable schemes to meet their requirements which range
widely. India, the world’s largest recipient of foreign remittances, got
$69 billion from NRIs in 2012. Nearly half of the money came from the
comparatively low earners in the Gulf region who send all their savings
home. Yet the government has not been sufficiently attentive to their
needs. The Pravasi Bharatiya registration fee of $250 blocks their
effective participation in the annual get-together.

Two years ago
the government granted the NRIs’ demand for voting right. However, in
the absence of facilities to vote online or at the Indian missions
abroad, few are able to exercise the right.

NRIs in the Gulf
region have long-standing grievances against Air India, the national
flag carrier, which, they say, charges high fares, especially at times
of festivals. Also, their children have to pay heavy fees for admission
to colleges under NRI quota.

The political class’s involvement
with nouveau riche NRIs is evident in the way selections are made for
the annual awards. Critics have said the only qualification of one
person who was honoured this year is that he is the son-in-law of a
billionaire.

The annual Diaspora gathering needs to be
saved from degenerating into a ritual. The government must devote
serious attention to improving the quality of the interaction.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 14, 2013

07 January, 2014

The signs of a presidential race in the making have dissipated
somewhat and the parliamentary elections, due in a few months, may now
follow the conventional pattern. The credit for this goes primarily to
the new kid on the block, the Aam Admi Party.

With regional
parties and small national parties gravitating towards the Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance or the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National
Democratic Alliance, before or after the elections, India has been going
through a phase of coalition governments for some years.

In the
elections of 2004 and 2009 the combined vote share of the Congress and
the BJP was below 50 per cent. This meant that a majority of the voters
were already with regional parties and small national parties. With
their vote share expected to go up in this year’s elections, ambitious
leaders of some of the parties began eying the prime minister’s chair.

Gujarat
Chief Minister Narendra Modi, whom the BJP picked as its prime
ministerial candidate, altered the political scenario with a bold
campaign in the recent assembly elections in four northern states, which
the media had dubbed as a semi-final. He succeeded in creating an
impression that the final will be a presidential kind of race between
him and Rahul Gandhi, the Congress party’s presumptive prime ministerial
nominee.

The BJP’s success in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and
Chhattisgarh and its emergence as the largest single party in Delhi
state appeared to confirm pollsters’ forecast that the BJP will emerge
as the largest single party in the next Lok Sabha and earn the right to
form the government. Modi sought to boost his prospects further by
setting the goal of an absolute majority for his party.

As the
implications of the Delhi verdict sank in, political observers found it
necessary to reassess the situation. The AAP, which blocked the BJP’s
return to power, was able to form the government in the state with the
Congress extending support from outside. It has now announced plans to
contest the Lok Sabha elections, raising an alarm in the coteries of the
established parties.

Many imagined the AAP will confine itself
to urban constituencies where it can hope to replicate the Delhi story.
But the party has said it will field as many candidates as possible, the
only restricting factors being its organisational limitations and the
availability of suitable candidates.

As in the Delhi state
elections, the AAP hopes to cash in on the people’s disgust with the
corrupt ways of the mainstream parties. In Yogendra Yadav, its
ideologue, the party has a valuable strategic planner. He has been
studying Indian electoral behaviour for many years and is possibly more
knowledgeable than anyone else in the country on the social dynamics of
the polity at both the national and regional levels.

Yadav
recently spoke of AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal as an alternative prime
ministerial candidate. Kejriwal quickly dismissed the suggestion, which
had the potential to bolster Modi’s bid to reduce the elections to a
one-to-one fight for the top post, glossing over the complex problems
for which the people are looking for solutions.

The Modi
juggernaut was already slowing down when Kejriwal threw a spanner in the
presidential works. It will be back on the road again after a re-jig
but it remains to be seen whether it can regain the lost momentum.

Tamil
Nadu Chief Minister and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader
J Jayalalithaa has set before her party the ambitious target of
grabbing all 39 of the state’s Lok Sabha seats as well as Puducherry’s
lone seat so as to give her a big role in national politics. Other state
party leaders are sure to follow her lead with a view to maximising
their bargaining power.

The Congress party, whose image is
tarnished by corruption scandals, is yet to put its act together. Its
governmental and organisational wings inspire little confidence. The
party’s rank and file view Rahul Gandhi as its prime ministerial face,
even though there has been no formal announcement to that effect.

He
recently forced the Centre to abandon a proposed law to protect tainted
legislators and got the Maharashtra government to re-examine its
decision to reject the probe report on the Adarsh scam. Such stray
interventions are not enough to convince the people that he can be the
agent of change they are looking for. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 7, 2014.